To watch and control the government; [Footnote:  “Government” here refers to the executive branch.] to throw the light of publicity on its acts; to compel a full explanation and justification of all of them which any one considers questionable; to censure them if found condemnable; to be at once the nation’s committee on grievances; an arena in which not only the opinion of the nation, but that of every section of it, and as far as possible, of every eminent individual that it contains, can produce itself in full sight and challenge full discussion.

As we have seen, the English House of Commons has a way to control executive leadership without destroying it.  Even if we desired to do so, we could not adopt the English plan without changing our Constitution.  But there are ways in which the same result could in a measure be accomplished without such change.  One of these is by a well-organized budget system.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR APPROPRIATIONS

The methods of making appropriations for the purposes of our national government have been as unbusinesslike as in the states.  Charges of extravagance and inefficiency have been made freely, the blame being placed sometimes upon Congress and sometimes upon the executive departments.  Both are at fault; and the difficulty is that it is almost impossible to fix the responsibility anywhere.

DUPLICATION AND CONFUSION IN THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH

Although the national government, unlike the states, has a single-headed executive, the executive departments are composed of a multitude of bureaus and other subdivisions that are not well organized in their relations to one another.  There is overlapping, duplication, and even conflict of work.  The director of finance of the War Department said that in the recent war,

The War Department entered this war without any fixed or carefully digested and prepared financial system.  There were at the beginning of the war five ... bureaus each independent of the others, each making its own contracts, doing its own purchasing, doing its own accounting, with as many different methods as there were bureaus.  As a result they were competing with each other in a market where the supplies in many cases for which they were competing were restricted in amount ...  There was no central authority to prune, revise, or compare estimates submitted and to coordinate expenditures, and that naturally resulted in overlappings and duplications, and some of them of a large amount. [Footnote:  Testimony before Budget Committee, quoted by Will Payne, “Your Budget,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 3, 1920, p. 32.]

The responsibility is partly in the executive department; but it is also partly in Congress, for it creates bureaus, defines their duties, appropriates money for them.  And in Congress the responsibility is divided among various committees.